I LOVE (note the present tense:-) Chrono Trigger. Chrono Cross is… not quite what I was hoping for in a sequel (it was not bad, it simply did not scratch that itch). I knew that Another Eden also would not be the same, yet it did seem the closest thing to it in spirit.
Thus when I started this game I decided that I wanted to be a completionist and grind my way through everything in it. So I went forward super slowly - I’m now >2.5 years in and I have not even started Main Story part 3 yet:-) - and like I got enough materials to upgrade every weapon and armor in the entire game, finishing out one dungeon entirely before moving on to the next, which I felt was true JRPG style even if it runs counter to how modern games are played. I even completed Otherlands before moving on to get grastas (mostly - I did take a bit of a break by overlapping them some). As you can see, that process took awhile to complete! Like, I did not move forward past PGAD until I had gotten all of the non-repeatable grastas from it, and same for AGAD, and so on.
So now it is very personally satisfying that I completed the final enemy kill achievement for content that existed when I first started. Every alarmed monster, every small mouse/gecko, every mob/horror/boss etc. I am considering Superbosses as a separate line of thinking although I am pretty sure that I accomplished that too - even without grastas I was able to tackle those, then with mere T2s I took on some more, then with T3s but no P/P or ores some more, and so on. I prioritized less the ones that were harder to access, like if it takes a minute to physically walk over to it, then it can wait!:-P Shout-out to the Power Creep chars that made that fairly painless: most often I completed them on the 1st, 2nd, or maybe 3rd try as a result, even as under-equipped as I was - like AS Tsubame cheesed all of the present & ancient Garulea demons that do not resist (or null or absorb) earth blunt, and ES Tsukiha 1TAF’d all the rest even without the opportunity to get into her more powerful form. Later I even managed to pull a modern DPS in Alma, but most often for the likes of e.g. Kudang or the emperor reborn from the first mythos she cannot even get into her Trance state yet before AS Clarte killed it already, no need even for AF, and AS Milsha completely (or mostly?) negated all of their damage plus Clarte innately has Hold Ground so… it was all super easy once I had pulled those gacha chars and decided to give the fight a try. Therefore I thought about going back to and re-doing those earlier ones with purely free characters, but there is always so much to do and that also is not a high priority - maybe one day!
In the meantime, the best part is that there is still so much content left to do!! By taking it slow like this, e.g. doing Otherlands and fishing and such, I still have much of the new content that has and continues to keep being added - like now that I have finished GoT2 I can complete the second Mythos that I was able to start but was not able to go beyond chapter 6 until finishing most of GoT2. And the the rest of harpooning awaits me, plus all of the cool new stuff (boating and sidekick gear and reforging and whatnot) presented along with Main Story part 3 - which by the time I start there may be a second wave of new content even:-) - and also I still have yet to visit (even once) the ADs for Purgatory, Iscariot, Sapient Complex: Midnight, Sea of Ice, Toto Theater World, Omegapolis (that one I need to finish all the non-repeatable grasta sets from Underworld first before I bother unlocking), and the latest one Warped Cochlea. The latter I think I will bump up to the top of the list b/c I am currently farming Nona so it fits.
I have definitely taken an unusual route through the game compared to most people it seems, but I am okay with that and I am enjoying what it has to offer. :-)
Edit: maybe you too would like to share your unique perspective on this game, to help get this community started? We do not have a post every day - and that is okay:-) - so we shall have to collectively figure out what we would like for it to be. Right now the small numbers offers both unique challenges as well as opportunities that would not have been possible at all with Reddit - like if 20k members were to post their personal stories it would have become quickly overwhelmed, plus multiple memes every single day, and the veritable TSUNAMI of questions (most of which could be solved by a 5-second lookup on the wiki) and bragging and salt - there would simply be multiple hundreds of posts (quite possibly over a thousand, no joke) every single day, but this place is different. The Kbin interface is buggy, the Federiverse is confusing, but we at least are here, so what shall we decide to do with it? :-D
WFS would be proud of your work. You should send them a fraction of what you’ve done :)
hmm, i think you have 2 good questions, but when soliciting a “call to action” or response from the reader, it helps to make clear a) who it is addressed to and 2) what you would like them to do.
for 1), maybe this is just me, but reading your question, it felt a little unclear… are you addressing this question to newcomers and lurkers? or everyone? i first thought of answering the question, but then i was hesitant to answer if it was directed mainly to lurkers due to the followup statements you had.
for 2), although the 2 questions are kind of related, I think the second question is worth it’s own discussion thread, or the existing pinned thread State of the magazine - July 2023 fits this question better.
in that thread, notice that beithioth asks multiple questions for discussion, so i am not suggesting you can’t ask multiple questions in a thread. but bethioth’s questions all fall under the main topic of the state/direction of the kbin magazine, and there is a clear call to action for more moderators.
i think an effective call to action is focused, simple and clear, and is usually the last thing to say in your closing statements.
in this thread, although your second question is a good one (direction of the magazine), it kind of detracts away from or disrupts the momentum of your first question. this thread has spent most of it’s time discussing how you like to experience the game at your own pace, and the best buildup to a call to action would be to end on your first question: now what about you? it is best to let your post linger on that question. it would have been better if any followup statements serve to clarify your first call to action, such as, what do you mean by unique perspective? do you mean perspective as in approach to playing the game, or as in what the game means to you? by moving onto a new topic before the reader has had a chance to answer the first one, i feel that the second question has made it harder for the reader to answer the first question. or at least, it has made the discussion less focused. i think it’s fine if a conversation has gone onto different topics in the replies, but when kicking off a discussion, i find it helpful for the initial call to action to be more focused.
i hope it doesn’t sound like i’m trying to impose some kind of “correct” way to do things, but i hope this clarifies why i had difficulty finding a way to respond to your post, and how it could be adjusted to better encourage a response.
to respond to your first question, i don’t place as much value on completing extra content and only bother to complete the main content and episodes, etc. i think i spend more time doing fanart than playing the game itself. the story and characters have more draw to me than the gameplay after it went off the rails with power creep starting with grastas.
for the second question, i think content will be slow here for a while due to a few factors. kbin is in its beta stages, so we only have early adopters here. others wont consider using it until there’s more feature parity with their existing platform. for example, multi-image uploads, tags, and spoilers are features missing from kbin. you need to reach a certain critical mass before you get a steady flow of activity. we have 32 subscribers, and about 5 people who participate in threads. that’s already a 15% participation rate! don’t get greedy now ;) personally speaking, i think a slower pace is fine for now to match what we can handle with the existing mod tools and am glad to be spending less time on social media since quitting reddit. and i suspect there might be more punctuated waves of people joining kbin/lemmy over time, such as when old.reddit.com gets removed.
that being said, the first thing i would like to see on kbin is multi image uploads, then spoilers. i think the lack of those feature hinder promotion of the types of activities we’d like to do on kbin a little bit. im not making any promises of any kind, but since it seems no one is looking into multi-image uploads, ive been looking into the kbin codebase and have gotten the app running on a local setup. however, all of this takes time so it’s not going to happen soon and I still have yet to see if i can actually do it.
in the meantime, i think we need to make do with what we have. i think when creating discussions inviting people to participate, it helps when the call to actions are clear and easy to take action on.
You are putting much more thought into this than I did! I thought the word “Edit:” would sufficiently convey that this was a mere after-thought, basically a footnote to an existing story. Being me, I wrote much more than merely one sentence into that, so perhaps its length sends the message that it was a greater part of the overall message, but no, I intended it merely as a follow-up leading statement offering sommething to think about, going off on a tangent away from rather than summarizing or wrapping up the OP. That is why it is so disconnected from the OP:-).
Speaking of, like art, which means both what the originator intended as well as what the recipient receives, whether it applies to a more senior player vs. lurkers is a question best pondered by each recipient individually, aka if you feel like it applies to you, then it probably does? :-D
If you want to put out a more formal call to action, then I agree it would need to be much better worded, to help accomplish its purpose, than this was.
To respond to your own response: I do kinda like the gameplay aspect - especially I enjoy the optimization problem of designing 1TnoAF or even fully 1-click solutions to running ADs. Power Creep is often not sufficient to accomplish that really unless you happen to have the bleeding edge of the current Meta, as well as full equipment. For example, even AS Tsubame’s basic attack replacement could not handle alarmed foes in VH Otherlands starting in the 2-3rd area of Ratle, b/c they have such high HP (for me lacking grastas at least, although it being preemptive was really super helpful, at a time when I had no other source of that, being only at the end of Main Story part 1 or probably by then halfway through part 1.5 at the time). So there are ways to work within the constraints of Power Creep: for one it means that remaining behind the curve, the difficulty is increased tremendously, but also when you finally pull someone it opens up the ability to do many things that you previously could not:-).
And I think it is so awesome that you are willing to help contribute to Kbin’s development! I do a lot of wiki editing for the same reason - e.g. I just wrote a whole series of pages for Lunatic-users and Lunatic support skills, and did a substantial expansion of the Character Skill in Table Template that Bluezero and I are developing and using all across the wiki, to support the kind of table format that I wanted to use on pages such as Setting Poison and Pain. It is super-annoying when people create new wiki accounts purely for the purpose of trolling me - as usual, vomiting their emotions at me upon seeing that I said something, without bothering to understand that thing first (in the latest instance, I said that we should not call P/P “guaranteed” anymore, since barriers exist such that a “guaranteed” skill can fail to inflict, which seems to me like that might cause some confusion to someone new to the game and not understanding its jargon rooted in facts that are no longer fully true?) - but since it helps especially new players learn about the game, I wanted to offer what I could.
Ahahaha, ok very good then. Anyone can answer.
that’s terrible. sometimes it’s better not to engage trolls because those types of folks crave a response, good or bad. but, you’re doing good work!